YoungPatrickBateman t1_iy9kz6b wrote on November 29, 2022 at 7:45 PM

Reply to comment by KanadainKanada in Encouraging self-harm to be criminalised in Online Safety Bill by speckz

Again, I feel like you’re being deliberately ignorant to what is being proposed.

No, advertising unhealthy food and fast cars wouldn’t be seen as encouraging self-harm.

Assisted suicide is not self-harm. That’s assisted dying at the choice of the person. Now if you were sitting there actively encouraging a person to kill themselves who has previously expressed no desire to di by assisted suicide then that could be seen as encouraging self-harm.

The law is often nuisances in the way it is applied. A judge often looks at a scenario and asks “would a reasonable person think advertising McDonalds is encouraging self-harm?”

In the case of this proposed law, it is clearly targeted at bullying and people who encourage others to harm themselves and to take their own life. In many cases when a child takes their own life it often because of a single group of people at school who are making their lives absolute hell.

My niece has a very happy and healthy home life but for a 6 month period a few years ago she was being tormented by a group of girls at her school. It was a relentless and never-ending stream of abuse 24 hours a day.

She would often be in tears at dinner because of the things these awful girls would say. I saw some of the messages she would receive on Instagram or Snapchat. Things like “you’re a disgusting pig. Nobody will ever love you. I don’t know why your parents didn’t abort you. You should abort yourself now” and “everybody at school hates you. You’re so dumb you should be in the slow class. You don’t even count as person” having shit like that constantly thrown at you will wear any person down over time. These girls were the only source of discontent in my nieces life.

My niece had, on more than one occasion, through heavy tears and discomfort expressed a desire to die to my sister and brother-in-law. Thankfully she didn’t go through with it and is much happy now that school is finished. But had she killed herself I would want those shitty girls to be held accountable for the words they said.

So yes, one person or a group of people can be the primary and only source of antagonism in a persons life. Plenty of kids with happy home lives kill themselves because of external pressures.

KanadainKanada t1_iy9ltb7 wrote on November 29, 2022 at 7:50 PM

> encouraging a person to kill themselves who has previously expressed no desire

So lets say someone starts to look around for talks about suicide & self-harm & depression that would imply definitely desire. Someone looking at 2500 posts about suicide (not getting messaged 2500 private mails!) is pretty sure is expression of a desire.

And the bill is fucking not about person a trying to actively encourage person b. It's about

> Content that encourages someone to harm themselves will be targeted in a new offence, making it illegal.

So a page, a group, a subreddit, a forum talking about self-harm could easily be seen as 'encouraging'.

You are not seeing the forest for the trees. This is not a law about someone gaslighting someone else to suicide.

Edit: Additionally you haven't apparently read the article. Because the case is nothing about things like you claim your niece faced. Even more - there are already laws to act against persons that directly attack, stalk or insult you (or your niece). It's already illegal what those girls did. So - you want another law that you can 'ignore'? Because you could have just called and used the existing laws.